happiness

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

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One of the “attractions” we visited last weekend during a short trip to the Berkshires was The Mount.  (I say “we” because I went with a relatively new acquaintance from Windrows who had proposed the trip and volunteered to do all the driving, which was about 3 1/2 hours each way from Princeton.)

The Mount is the house the novelist Edith Wharton designed and built in Lenox, Massachusetts, and occupied most of the time from 1902 until 1911, when she separated from her husband and moved to Paris.  It is white and cool — important in the sweltering pre-air-conditioned New York and New England summers — and sits on raised ground.  In the rear is a magnificent landscape of Italianate gardens, formal on one side, “natural” on the other. Although I’d been to Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, several times in my several past lives, I was never before able to visit The Mount because it was under reconstruction each time.   However, for several years now it’s at last been open to the public.

I’m a sucker for gift shops at such places. I always want some little reasonably priced something to remind me I was there.  At The Mount’s gift shop you can buy heavy and expensive illustrated books of Italianate gardens and others about The Mount itself, which I didn’t.  You can also buy copies of most of the over forty books of fiction and non-fiction Wharton wrote and published during her lifetime, which I also didn’t.

According to the guide who led us through the house, she did the writing in bed from 8:30 to 11:30 every morning of her life, before arising to don the corseted, restrictive day clothes of her era. She tossed each handwritten sheet on the floor, later to be gathered and typed up by a secretary.  In her bedroom on the top floor you can see scattered on the bed photocopies of some of those pages — of The House of Mirth, written at The Mount.  The writing enabled her to enhance her inheritance so as to support expensive living in Paris and the Riviera. She was a great success in her lifetime.  (The three novels still generally recognized and admired today, whose titles you may recognize and movie adaptations of which you may have seen, are The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome).

Not surprisingly, several pithy sayings suitable for printing on cards may be found in the collected works of a woman who wrote so much. Again no surprise — such cards were indeed in the shop, and then they were in my purse, and now they are going to be in the blog.  ($4.00 each: How’s that for a reminder I was there? Ah well, the Mount’s reconstruction is still paying for itself.). Although faithful blog readers may be able to surmise why these two particular cards spoke to me,  I suspect they may have general relevance to most everyone past the first flush of youth. (Or else why would they have been in the shop?)

But first some Wharton back story.  She was born into New York high society in 1862, when women were discouraged from achieving anything but a proper marriage. Unfortunately, she was a bookish girl who read widely (in French, German and Italian as well as English), and early on yearned for a wider intellectual life than was thought seemly for those in her social circle. Her marriage to Ted Wharton was not good.  He was social, outgoing and apparently not much of a thinker; she relished solitude, books, and good conversation. There were no children. Eventually he became mentally unbalanced, they separated, and she achieved a divorce.  She is known to have had only one lover, after separating from her husband; the lover turned out to be a cad with a divorced wife, a mistress, a fiancee, and a propensity for sticking his pen in many inkwells. Nonetheless, she hung on for three years before giving up.  (Her private papers reveal that it was with him, at the age of 47, she had her first orgasm.) Afterwards, she continued her ongoing and copious written correspondence with male friends such as Henry James and Walter Berry, but seemed to have had no later intimates.

As she advises (on the card above), “If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.”  And perhaps she did have a pretty good time.  (Not to be cynical, but I can’t help thinking the money helped.  However, she earned it herself. And I do believe she enjoyed the writing as well as the spending.) Moreover, I once had a psychotherapist who said just about the same thing.  He asked me what I wanted.  I was fifty-seven.  I said I wanted to be happy. He said happiness was not the goal of therapy.

Another card (which I also bought) quotes Wharton’s thoughts on how to have a pretty good time without trying to be happy.  Actually, the thoughts are not specifically about not trying to be happy, but about how to stay alive — which I take to mean alive in all senses of the word — well after the age at which most (all right, many) people start to fall apart.

But it seems to me it comes to the same thing in the end:

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Be unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things?That’s a tall order, about which we could talk for days. For one thing,  life is change.  Often we forget it.  Our lives continue day to day, seemingly the same.  Boring even.  And then, suddenly, boom! — it’s not the same at all.  And yes, it is scary.  Especially the older you get.  But what are you going to do?  Give up?  Or go on?  I’m not going to wax philosophical about intellectual curiosity or interest in big things, either. You’ve got it.  Or you don’t.  (Although I suppose you could force yourself because you know it’s good for you; better to be insatiable about learning something new than be insatiable about chocolate cake.)

But happy in small ways?  Well, sure. Small ways to be happy turn up all the time, usually when we least expect.  In fact, six of them turned up right in The Mount’s gift shop, next to the Wharton lessons in life. However, I’m also discovering that part of becoming old old (“long past the usual date of disintegration”) is pacing yourself.  So I’ll just save them for the next post!

WRITING SHORT: 50/50

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[Summer heat is fading away. Although this last of my short summer posts has run before, it seems a good way to end.]

Our cat Sasha pushes back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrives at my side of the bed, miaows once to announce her presence, and waits for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful. She has a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back towards Bill and pat the mattress.  “Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She considers.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the bowls against the wall; head for the set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window, where she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — and collapses against me, at just the right spot for me to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

Then she gives a half-turn for my hand to do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me. She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please. All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She’s happy.

I’m happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other—our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

(Reblogged from November 18, 2013)

A KIND OF HEAVEN (A REBLOG)

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[When TGOB was new last November, this was the fourth piece I posted. Everything in it remains true. Bill and I are now one year older than when I wrote it, but we’re still here.  Keep your fingers crossed…. ]

*****

 If I’m lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation. I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress. “Hi Sasha. Hi sweetheart. Come on. Come on up, Sosh.” I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it. She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no. This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants. Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me. Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down. Claws in, her paws manipulate me. She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher. I obey, a lover wishing only to please. All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr. She is happy.

I am happy, too. I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever. (Don’t say anything. I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours. Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

GOOD FOR WHATEVER AILS YOU

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I can’t remember who first sent me this.  Just that it came in an email and made me feel good.  So good, in fact, I played it again twice more before saving it for a rainy day.

It’s a flashmob performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, staged and filmed in the main square of Sabadell, Spain, to look as if it were spontaneous. But you don’t really need to know that. Just think of it as a booster shot of happy.

I ran it here nearly a year ago, when this blog was new and had two dozen viewers. (It got three likes!) So a few of you have seen it. But very few. Now that for most of us the leaves are falling, winter’s chill is in the early morning air, and we’re setting our clocks back this Sunday to conserve what little light seems left in the world — it may be time to run it again. After nearly two hundred years, it’s still a heartwarming infusion of pure joy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GBaHPND2QJg&feature=youtu.be

A KIND OF HEAVEN

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[Re-blogged from November 18, 2013]

If I am lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress.  ”Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me.  Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me.  She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please.  All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She is happy.

I am happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

FINISHING WHAT I STARTED

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The story thus far:  In her last post, Bad Girl was confessing to having been greedy and self-indulgent about books, to having bought books more quickly than she can read them.  Bad Girl of course is me, the one with the punitive super-ego and a determination to finish whatever I start, however long it takes. That goes for both (a) reading the books on the windowsill and (b) telling you about them.  Telling is easier and faster than reading.  Are you up for it?

1. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. Three-volume boxed set. I did manage to make my way through half a one-volume edition in my twenties, but never finished. Why begin again? Because two Septembers ago, I re-read Anna Karenina,  after more than half a century. This time I loved it so much.  The half-century had changed me as a reader.  Anna was no longer just the story of an adulterous love affair gone bad, as I once thought, which had made much of the rest of the book uninteresting. It was a whole vanished world brought back to life, a world in which Anna played only a not-so-admirable, although tragic, part, and one I hated to leave when I reached the last page. War and Peace is longer than Anna, so I thought having it in three volumes rather than a single heavy and bulky one would make it physically easier to hold and read.  It’s also a beautiful edition, bound in wine-colored cloth.  In fact, just telling you about it makes me want to drop everything and begin. Ah, well.

2. Beethoven, by Lewis Lockwood. A year ago Bill and I took a terrific night course at Princeton Adult School on listening to Beethoven’s  piano sonatas, taught by Scott Burnham, the Schiede Professor of Music at Princeton University.  He was witty, lyrical, enthusiastic, gymnastic, and wore jeans:  everything one wants, and rarely gets, all rolled up in a single professor. He recommended Lockwood as the one book to read on Beethoven if we were going to read only one.  (In number two place was  Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven  — the psychological approach to biography. But I had already bought and read that one.) We’ve signed up for a second course with Burnham this spring.  He will almost certainly recommend another book.  Fortunately, there’s still room on the metaphorical windowsill.

3.  A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel. I loved, loved, loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies — the first two remarkable books in her three-volume fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell. It was so hard to emerge from the sixteenth century when I had finished that I had to go back to read many parts again. Hurry up with the third volume, Hilary!  In the meanwhile, there’s this book, also fictional, which she wrote earlier about three men who counted for a lot in the French Revolution: Robespierre, Danton and Camille Desmoulins. 748 pages in paperback, though. Which explains why it’s still on the windowsill.

4.  The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis.  Davis is the skilled and sensitive translator of the most recent edition in English of Proust’s Swann’s Way.  Her ability to tame his labyrinthian, sometimes page-long sentences into beautiful and accurate readability was extraordinary.  She also writes short — often very very short — stories, which have been collected and can currently be purchased all together in one book. This one is her only “novel,” and is much slimmer, so I thought I would start with that.  Except I haven’t. Yet.

5.  This Is The Story of A Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett. A novelist whose work I have read only sporadically, and chiefly when her short stories appear in The New Yorker  (to which I’ve subscribed faithfully, with very few breaks, since I was twenty and a youthful admirer of J.D. Salinger, whose stories were then appearing in its pages). Patchett recently became the co-proprietor of a bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee, where she now lives — so that Nashville should have a place where one can buy the kinds of books she likes to read.  I visited Nashville several times during the year one of my sons was working there and concluded that Nashville did indeed need an independent bookstore.  Which predisposed me to like Patchett and therefore to acquire this, her latest book — a collection of essays and other short pieces.  I am particularly inclined to short pieces, not only because they are short, but because they are what I have been trying to write, both before the blog and also now that I’m blogging. I’ve always maintained that you learn to write by reading. Even at eighty-two. Just give me time.

6.  Little Failure, A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart. His fourth and newest book. I’m beginning to like memoirs, if well written, much better than most fiction.  Moreover, Shteyngart is a funny, sad, bitter and skillful writer, who is also a Russian Jew brought to Brooklyn by his parents when he was seven.  That makes us landsmen, although he’s about half my age. Also, I read his first two and enjoyed them.  How could I not buy this one? (P.S.  “Little Failure” is what his parents used to call him.  In Russian, of course.)

7. Coin Street Chronicles, by Gwen Southgate.  Last fall, Bill and I participated in a seminar course on “Five Angry Young Men and One Woman” at the Evergreen Forum, a lifelong learning program in Princeton designed principally for “seniors.” It was taught by Lee Harrod, an emeritus professor of The College of New Jersey. We read and discussed novels and plays written in England during the two decades after World War II. Gwen Southgate, who I did not know before, was also in the class.  As a child, she had lived through that war in England, and had much of great interest to tell us.  (Had there been a class vote, we two would have been tied for Most Talkative.) One of the others in the class let it be known that Gwen had written a memoir about her childhood. She is my contemporary.  Despite the dissimilarities between us  — as you may note from her occasional comments on this blog, which she is kind enough to follow — how could I not buy her book?  Now I just have to find time to read it.

8. Lit, A Memoir, by Mary Karr.  A mistaken purchase.  Last spring, I took a short Princeton University course for auditors  about Literary Memoir.  A reading list was posted online, but later revised.  This book was on the original list and then removed, but I had already bought a used copy of it.    Although it was no longer part of the curriculum, I kept it for future reading because it’s a confessional. (“Lit” being a colloquial synonym for “drunk.”)  I too once wrote 187 pages of a confessional, which is still on my computer.  (Original title: “My Secret Life.” Now retitled. Not about alcoholism.) My 187 pages were intended to be Part I of a two-part book.  However, I never could work out how to do the second part and thought I might get some ideas from Karr. Since I haven’t had the time or urge to read her book yet, I still draw a blank on finishing my own.  Sorry, no more questions.

9. The AfterLife, Essays and Criticism, by Penelope Fitzgerald.  She was a wonderful novelist who began to write relatively late in life.  The Blue Flower is unforgettable, but I have also found pleasure in all her other novels, and have re-read many of them. This book, published posthumously, contains her non-fiction. I have no idea what I will find when I sit down with it.  I bought the book because what’s in it was from her. When I find an author this good, I’m intensely loyal.

10. Memories of a Marriage, by Louis Begley.  Another loyalty choice. It may be good, it may be less good: I don’t care. Begley was an international corporate lawyer at a major New York law firm (he’s now retired) who took a three month sabbatical to write his first book, Wartime Lies, at the age of 63. I give paperback copies of it to everyone I care about.  It attached me to him for life, although I am less fond of some of his subsequent fiction, which is concerned with the problems of aging men.  (Caveat: Why The Dreyfus Affair Matters, not fiction, is a must-read.)  When I see Begley has put out a new book, I buy it.  Simple as that.  This is the latest.

11. The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell. A very used and yellowed copy, purchased last summer after a brief fling with Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project.  Gretchen recommended it.  She went to Yale Law School and clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court before she became a blogger. So maybe she knows something I don’t.  Besides, who doesn’t want to be happy?  Then I got happier.  Not necessarily thanks to her. So I haven’t read the book yet.

12. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Another Gretchen recommendation.  She loves children’s books.  (She has two little girls, according to her blog.)  This book, I know, is a classic.  However, I never read or gave it to my own children when they were young. So I was curious. Curiosity may not kill (if you’re not a cat), but it does result in less space on your shelf.

13. Frenchwomen Don’t Get Facelifts, by Mireille Guilano.  Don’t laugh.  I have a certain interest in both France and facelifts. [Two summers ago I ventured to explore this facelift business with an actual cosmetic surgeon, but decided no. Didn’t know that about me, did you?]  Also, my younger son once made me a present of Guilano’s earlier book, Frenchwomen Don’t Get Fat, when he saw me eyeing it in a bookstore.  It was a fun read, and I kept it — possibly because of who had bought it for me. Obviously I needed its sequel.  Well, I did.  Didn’t I?  Didn’t I?

14. Diving for Pearls, A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, by Kathleen B. Jones.  I met Kathy last October at a very crowded fund-raiser tea given in New York by Persimmontree, an online magazine of the arts by women over sixty.  I was there with a friend who had contributed a piece to the magazine, as I had done.  Kathy was the guest of another contributor.  We found ourselves face to face in the crush — many contributors, small private house — and got to talking.  She is a retired American academic now living in Bristol, England and writing up a storm.  Blog, book, articles.  We liked each other, and promised to stay in touch.  Then she went back to England. This book on her intellectual/philosophical journey with Hannah Arendt, which she mentioned during the tea, was published last November, after a sizable excerpt had appeared in the Los Angeles Times. I read the excerpt and bought the book.  Well, wouldn’t you? Although I’m not much of a philosopher, the reason the book’s still on the windowsill is a time thing. Really and truly. If we do get together again in the spring, which we discussed but now seems to me doubtful considering how busy she is with Arendt conferences, of course I will read it first.  (And hope I understand it.)  I never show up without having done my homework!

15. Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan.  Another quasi-loyalty selection. Enjoyed Atonement and Saturday.  Thought On Chesil Beach was well done, although I found it hard to believe.  (But then I’m not English.)  So why not his next one?  Sweet Tooth has only been in the house for about two weeks, and I might actually be able to get to it in the foreseeable future, as it doesn’t seem too taxing. It may therefore be only a temporary windowsill resident.

16. 2666, by Roberto Bolano.  I forgot why I had bought this and had to look at the cover and frontispiece to refresh my memory. There I learned that Bolano lived in Mexico and Spain, where he died prematurely at the age of 50. 2066 was published posthumously and won major awards in Spain and Latin America. When translated into English by Natasha Wimmer, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. But in paperback it has 898 pages, which partially explains why I have been slow to begin.  But only partially explains.  The description of it in The Washington Post is also off-putting:  “With 2066, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes and Vollmann, who push the novel far past the conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist’s place in it.  Bolano has joined the immortals.”  And here is Francine Prose, in Harper’s Magazine: “The opening of 2066 had me in thrall from those first few pages….For all the precision and poetry of its language, for all the complexity of its structure, for all the range of styles and genres it acknowledges and encompasses, for all its wicked humor, its inventiveness and sophistication, 2666 seems like the work of a literary genius.”  Will I be smart enough for this book?  Or will I go down in defeat? I hesitate to find out.

17. My Early Life, by Winston Churchill.  A third Gretchen Rubin recommendation. I read this long ago just after Churchill died, but somehow became separated from my original copy.  Since Gretchen recommended it, I bought it again, to see what she thought was so special about it.  Haven’t yet re-read it.

18. Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell.  A purchase driven by having seen and enjoyed the movie made of the book on Netflix. Wanted more. After a few pages, the book itself proved too much more.  Maybe I’ll do better with it another time.

19. Elizabeth Gaskell, by Jenny Uglow.  Biography of the author. Don’t say I’m not thorough when I decide to look into something.

20. Works on Paper, The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, by Michael Holroyd.  I liked both parts of his own autobiography.  This one is a collection of short pieces on a subject in which I am interested.  Perhaps it will teach me something more about how to write about myself? (Which, as you can’t help but notice, I do quite a bit of.)  We’ll find out if I ever get around to reading it.

21. Less Than One, Selected Essays, by Joseph Brodsky. From Bill.  Too important to give back.  Too gloomy to take to the bathroom.  Dilemma.  Windowsill.

22. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs.  Also from Bill.  I do like the title.  And it’s a very slender book.  So it’s a keeper. For now.

23. Gulag, A History, by Anne Applebaum.  The Gulag was, of course, the vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners, and part of the system of repression and punishment that terrorized an entire society. This book about it, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was so highly praised we bought it twice.  I bought it for Bill as a surprise, and Bill bought it for Bill before my surprise arrived.  So then he had two copies, and guess who got the other one. I do not dispute its merit.  “The most authoritative — and comprehensive — account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer.” (Newsweek)  “A titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound….No reader will easily forget Applebaum’s vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag.”  (National Review) “Lucid, painstakingly detailed, never sensational, it should have a place on every educated reader’s shelves.” (Los Angeles Times)  I modestly admit I am an educated reader, and now the book does have a place on my shelves.  But the thing is, I don’t want to read vivid accounts of horrible human suffering.  It’s bad enough to know such suffering existed.  Must I?  I suppose I must.  Just not yet, please….

24. Hermit in Paris, by Italo Calvino.  A third from Bill. Probably not long for the windowsill.  Flipping through it one day, I discovered a snippy bit about my alma mater.  This classy author was arch and snide about Sarah Lawrence College?  No, Italo, no!  I can be arch and snide if I want, but you can’t. I’m a graduate, you were a guest. If you keep this up the next time I flip your pages, back to Bill you go!

25. Unknown Masterpieces: Writers Rediscover Literature’s Hidden Classics.  Bill can’t stop.  Why does he keep doing this to me?  Doesn’t he think I have enough to read?  On the other hand, this one is easy to tuck into a large handbag for reading away from home.  Interesting short pieces by writers I have heard of (like John Updike, Susan Sontag, Francine Prose, Toni Morrison, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick) about writers I’ve never heard of that the known-to-me writers consider “hidden classics.”  Why not?  Let it stay.  It might come in handy sometime.

26-28.  Portrait of A Lady;The Wings of the Dove;The Golden Bowl, all by Henry James.  I once audited a course at Princeton on the novels of Henry James and William Faulkner because these two authors, who are each in his own way difficult, represented yawning gaps in my reading experience. In the course, we had time only to read James’s Daisy Miller, The American, The Ambassadors, The Turn of the Screw and four or five of the short stories.  Unfortunately, I tend to become overenthusiastic about whatever I do while I’m doing it, although the glow often fades fast afterwards.  So it was with James.  Wings and Bowl are two of the late difficult novels we didn’t cover in class that I just had to have, and Portrait is too well known not to have read.  I was certainly going to attend to all three of them when the semester was over. That was nearly three years ago.

29-32. Go Down Moses; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom; Selected Short Stories, all by William Faulkner. For an explanation of why these are in my home, see 26-28 above.  Different author, but same Princeton course, same initial enthusiasm, same result.  Shelved, until further notice.

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In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that I’m omitting discussion of the titles on my iPad, whether from Kindle or iBook, because this post is now far too long as it is, and I can’t believe anyone could possibly still be sufficiently interested in it to scroll down any further.

I am also not mentioning James Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (other than Swann’s Way), Dante’s Inferno and the Shakespeare plays I haven’t yet read, all of which I hope I will read before I die — because I’ve owned copies of them for far longer than three years and if we begin examining my entire library, we will not be done for a very long time.  Enough is enough.  Even for me.

Out of the confessional and on to something else.  Any suggestions?

A KIND OF HEAVEN

Standard

If I am lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress.  “Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me.  Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me.  She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please.  All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She is happy.

I am happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.